When designing an interior portion (e.g., cabin or other interior areas within the fuselage) of an aircraft, for example a business aircraft, aircraft manufacturers develop very refined designs to meet high customer expectations such as comfort, aesthetics, functionality, and the like. Many of these customers are accustom to luxury in their homes, automobiles, and lifestyles, and have high expectations for how their business jet looks and functions.
Further, to make an aircraft travel faster and further, aircraft manufacturers have optimized the structural designs to reduce weight of aircrafts. Weight is a primary metric used to track efficiency as a lighter aircraft takes less energy to accelerate quickly and travel further. Weight is often reduced by removing excess material or using special materials with a high strength-to-weight ratio. Detailed structural analysis is performed to ensure that the reduced weight design(s) will meet or exceed FAA strength requirements.
One potential consequence of reducing material in the structure design is increased flexibility of the aircraft including the aircraft's fuselage. Increased flexibility can be beneficial as a certain amount of flexibility in the aircraft structure can help to distribute loads and eliminate stress concentrations. An aircraft is designed to handle a variety of loads during flight including wing lift and internal cabin pressure. When an aircraft structure is flexible, the aircraft including the fuselage and cabin floor can change shape in response to these flight loads. However, when such shape changes occur, interior cabin furniture and/or hardware that is attached to the fuselage and cabin floor can move. Unfortunately, this can have a negative effect on the appearance and/or limit the performance of the interior cabin furniture and/or hardware. For example, unsightly gaps at door openings can result, causing light bleeding or door malfunctions.
Aircraft interior designers develop furniture and/or hardware designs to minimize these problems. Furniture or hardware assets are often attached to areas of the fuselage and cabin floor with minimum movement and incorporate overlap joints and brackets to maintain position during flight. However, sometimes these measures are not enough and shape changes from flight loads can cause problems for aircraft interiors. Knowing what interior features move including the magnitude and direction of such movement can help an aircraft designer to manage fuselage and cabin floor movements. One approach is to capture pictures of interior cabin features that deform during flight. Although pictures of deformed features and gaps that occur during flight can be helpful, such pictures typically provide limited quantitative feedback to the aircraft designer. Another approach is to take linear measurements during flight with tape measures, string potentiometers or the like to provide information about key points on the interior. Unfortunately, such data is also limited and provides one-dimensional information at just a few discrete locations.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide improved method for characterizing shape changes of an interior portion of an aircraft from flight loads. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the various embodiments described herein will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background.